Carol Vorderman

Music: 'Like Swimming' by Foals

She said these wasp's nests in your head, These wasp's nests.

Today a wasp flew into my windscreen.

As I was ploughing through the air at a speed of 60mph, a piece of debris slammed into the glass in front of me. A piece of living, dying debris; a fear, a fuhrer of summer picnics.

Black wings, black body, punctuated by yellow hoops, an evil football strip, to terrify. There it was, prostrate, at my mercy. You can't sting your way through glass.

Its frail limbs struggled in the breeze, or perhaps there was still life in it. Trapped now between the screen and a wiper blade, it had no hope. Sadistically bent on revenge, I accelerated.

For all of the times you terrified me, wasps, this is my ultimate revenge.


I'm a terrible person, and I've made a terrible mistake.

Sq.

Victorian ice and Edwardian snow, You'll find yourself asking is there something below?

I spent some time in the snow, when it snowed all those days ago. On this very hill, in this very field.

Now, it's a green field that I hardly recognise.

Is it strange that it's so mundane now, so banal and useless to me, when it was such a fairground before?

I was riding a bicycle through the lanes which meander through these fields and thought of the whiter times.

If anything I just felt warmer than the last time I'd visited these fields.

Snow melts. It's an ever useful metaphor for everything, isn't it. An over applied cliche which I have pandered to yet again. It really happened though - ay, there's the rub.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Under the snow and ice, a brush of normality stays hidden.

Sq.

If Heaven and Hell decide, That they both are satisfied, Illuminate the 'NO's on their Vacancy signs...

The cost of inaction, procrastination.

What if I fail? What if I miserably fail to reach the bar they set? It's so easy. Every day that passes I get closer to falling, to failing and being a disappointed disappointment.

The 19th of August 2009; I won't sleep.
The 20th August 2009; Will decide my fate.

Of all the writers I'd love to study, how many would agree with me feeling so completely shit just for wanting to study them with people as enthusiastic as me, and learn from people who know so much more than me? Is it right to be able to give me such uncompromising criteria to meet to study the works of humans like myself, when those works are available to every man?

Not that I wish to devalue the degree. I want more than anything to learn from the experts, to become an expert myself. I suppose I want it so much that it's easier to deny that I can get it, in case I don't.

I guess I'm just terrified of falling short.

And I really hate History A-Level.

Sq.

This is what you do to me, I close my eyes so I can't see, You let your love rain down on me

Love Reign Over Me - David Holmes (plays in background of clip)
Keep shut: Your mouth.

Telling you doesn't change anything, though. Maybe talking doesn't get us anywhere. Typing to an invisible ether, to try and cleanse my soul. I convince myself it works, sometimes. Maybe none of this makes sense.

Something that does make sense is reading. Even if it doesn't resolve things, it lets you know there are others who can't resolve it too. The best response to a poem, in terms of emotional redemption, is perhaps the knowing 'Yeeaahh...', accompanied by a slow nod.

Surely that is the point of literature- of reading it, anyway; to find out that you are far from alone in the world. It's populated with people seeing things like you do and, while you may find absolute fucking idiots with no apparent regard for your feelings, there are those who exist who see what you see, and there is an unexplained comfort in that.

Sq.